nature, my vigor sensibly declines. What little of
Page 90
Kin to these years-long silences are the hidden silences; work aborted, deferred, deniedhidden by the work which does come to fruition. Hopkins rightfully belongs here; almost certainly William Blake; Jane Austen, Olive Schreiner, Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Franz Kafka; Katherine Anne Porter, many other contemporary writers.
Censorship silences. Deletions, omissions, abandonment of the medium (as with Hardy); paralyzing of capacity (as Dreiser's ten-year stasis on Jennie Gerhardt after the storm against Sister Carrie). Publishers' censorship, refusing subject matter or treatment as ''not suitable" or "no market for." Self-censorship. Religious, political censorshipsometimes spurring inventivenessmost often (read Dostoyevsky's letters) a wearing attrition.
The extreme of this: those writers physically silenced by governments. Isaac Babel, the years of imprisonment, what took place in him with what wanted to be written? Or in Oscar Wilde, who was not permitted even a pencil until the last months of his imprisonment?
Other silences. The truly memorable poem, story, or book, then the writer ceasing to be published.** Was one work all the writers had in them (life too thin for pressure of material, renewal) and the respect for literature too great to repeat themselves? Was it "the knife of the perfectionist attitude in art and life" at their throat? Were the conditions not present for establishing the habits of creativity (a young Colette who lacked a Willy to lock her in her room each day)? oras instanced over and overother claims, other responsibilities so writing could not be first? (The writer of a class, sex, color still marginal in literature, and whose coming to written voice at all against complex odds is exhausting achievement.) It is an eloquent commentary that this one-book si-
it is left, I husband for certain matters as yet incomplete and which indeed may never be completed." Billy Budd never was completed; it was edited from drafts found after Melville's death.
*As Jean Toomer (Cane); Henry Roth (Call It Sleep); Edith Summers Kelley (Weeds).
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lence has been true of most black writers; only eleven in the hundred years since 1850 have published novels more than twice. *
There is a prevalent silence I pass by quickly, the absence of creativity where it once had been; the ceasing to create literature, though the books may keep coming out year after year. That suicide of the creative process Hemingway described so accurately in ''The Snows of Kilimanjaro":
He had destroyed his talent himselfby not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, by snobbery, by hook and by crook; selling vitality, trading it for security, for comfort.
No, not Scott Fitzgerald. His not a death of creativity, not silence, but what happens when (his words) there is "the sacrifice of talent, in pieces, to preserve its essential value."
Almost unnoted are the foreground silences, before the achievement. (Remember when Emerson hailed Whitman's genius, he guessed correctly: "which yet must have had a long foreground for such a start.") George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Isak Dinesen, Sherwood Anderson, Dorothy Richardson, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, A. E. Coppard, Angus Wilson, Joyce Caryall close to, or in their forties before they became published writers; Lampedusa, Maria Dermout (The Ten Thousand Things), Laura Ingalls Wilder, the "children's writer," in their sixties. ** Their capacities evident early in the "being one on whom nothing is lost"; in other writers' qualities. Not all struggling and anguished, like Anderson, the foreground years; some needing the immobilization of long illness or loss, or the sudden lifting of responsibility to make writing necessary, make writing possible; others waiting circumstances and encouragement (George Eliot, her Henry Lewes; Laura
Page 90
Kin to these years-long silences are the hidden silences; work aborted, deferred, deniedhidden by the work which does come to fruition. Hopkins rightfully belongs here; almost certainly William Blake; Jane Austen, Olive Schreiner, Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Franz Kafka; Katherine Anne Porter, many other contemporary writers.
Censorship silences. Deletions, omissions, abandonment of the medium (as with Hardy); paralyzing of capacity (as Dreiser's ten-year stasis on Jennie Gerhardt after the storm against Sister Carrie). Publishers' censorship, refusing subject matter or treatment as ''not suitable" or "no market for." Self-censorship. Religious, political censorshipsometimes spurring inventivenessmost often (read Dostoyevsky's letters) a wearing attrition.
The extreme of this: those writers physically silenced by governments. Isaac Babel, the years of imprisonment, what took place in him with what wanted to be written? Or in Oscar Wilde, who was not permitted even a pencil until the last months of his imprisonment?
Other silences. The truly memorable poem, story, or book, then the writer ceasing to be published.** Was one work all the writers had in them (life too thin for pressure of material, renewal) and the respect for literature too great to repeat themselves? Was it "the knife of the perfectionist attitude in art and life" at their throat? Were the conditions not present for establishing the habits of creativity (a young Colette who lacked a Willy to lock her in her room each day)? oras instanced over and overother claims, other responsibilities so writing could not be first? (The writer of a class, sex, color still marginal in literature, and whose coming to written voice at all against complex odds is exhausting achievement.) It is an eloquent commentary that this one-book si-
it is left, I husband for certain matters as yet incomplete and which indeed may never be completed." Billy Budd never was completed; it was edited from drafts found after Melville's death.
*As Jean Toomer (Cane); Henry Roth (Call It Sleep); Edith Summers Kelley (Weeds).
Page 91
lence has been true of most black writers; only eleven in the hundred years since 1850 have published novels more than twice. *
There is a prevalent silence I pass by quickly, the absence of creativity where it once had been; the ceasing to create literature, though the books may keep coming out year after year. That suicide of the creative process Hemingway described so accurately in ''The Snows of Kilimanjaro":
He had destroyed his talent himselfby not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, by snobbery, by hook and by crook; selling vitality, trading it for security, for comfort.
No, not Scott Fitzgerald. His not a death of creativity, not silence, but what happens when (his words) there is "the sacrifice of talent, in pieces, to preserve its essential value."
Almost unnoted are the foreground silences, before the achievement. (Remember when Emerson hailed Whitman's genius, he guessed correctly: "which yet must have had a long foreground for such a start.") George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Isak Dinesen, Sherwood Anderson, Dorothy Richardson, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, A. E. Coppard, Angus Wilson, Joyce Caryall close to, or in their forties before they became published writers; Lampedusa, Maria Dermout (The Ten Thousand Things), Laura Ingalls Wilder, the "children's writer," in their sixties. ** Their capacities evident early in the "being one on whom nothing is lost"; in other writers' qualities. Not all struggling and anguished, like Anderson, the foreground years; some needing the immobilization of long illness or loss, or the sudden lifting of responsibility to make writing necessary, make writing possible; others waiting circumstances and encouragement (George Eliot, her Henry Lewes; Laura
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